MetalPost-rock
Pelagic Records · 2 October 2026
“I Breathe. I Am.” (6:27) is the longest track on the record, and it opens “Annihilist” with Jakob Fiszer’s bass ahead of the guitars, which never happened on the previous record. The six that follow all sit between 4:14 and 5:46.
All three of the band’s albums have seven tracks. “Meridian” (2021) added up to 41:53 and “Stasis” (2024) to 46:34, with four pieces over the seven-minute mark; this one comes in at 38:26 and nothing on it reaches seven. The compression is the most visible decision here, and you hear it most on “Oblivion Walker” (4:14), which changes tempo around the third minute on a weld you can see.
“Builder of Eden” (5:41) is sung by Loïc Rossetti on the bridge. He left The Ocean in June 2025 after sixteen years fronting the band, and this is one of the first things anyone has heard from him since: the voice comes in once the riff has gone round twice, and it stays halfway between a scream and a clean line. Chiaran Verheyden, guitarist and writer of the music, says that this time he brought the material to rehearsal half-finished: “I shared half-baked goods. I liked having the others involved sooner.” With him are Stefan De Graef on vocals, Sander De Rom on guitar and second voice, Fiszer on bass and Lander De Nyn on drums.
The album closes a story carried over from the previous two, with the same unnamed protagonist condemned to reincarnate, and the label spells it out at length in the press material. None of it is audible: the seven tracks work as standalone songs and not one of them picks up a musical theme from the other two records. The narrative stays in the booklet. What does hold from start to finish is the contrast, and “Everything Is Permissible” (5:39) pushes it as far as it goes with a mid-section groove that is nearly blues and could easily have sounded out of place.
The band tour with Hypno5e through France and the Netherlands until December, and on 5 May 2027 they bring it to Razzmatazz 3 in Barcelona with Cobra The Impaler.
Rating: 8.2/10
Text by Roger Estivill